Research

Marek’s master’s thesis (Stockholm School of Economics, 2024), developed further as a project during the audit of Industrial Organization II (ECON 601) at Yale, Spring 2026. Firms charge markups roughly 15% higher in years they hold government contracts, and that premium fell from about 30% in 2006 to 10% in 2021. Estimated on a 2006–2021 panel of Czech construction firms with the production approach, using selection-on-observables designs and models for unobserved factors to address participation bias, and synthetic-control and matrix-completion estimators to trace the decline, consistent with institutional improvements in Czech procurement over the period.

Its replication package is part of the Applied Economics Incubator’s production-function collection (University of Chicago, 2026).